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Showing blog posts tagged with Anthropology

Visitors to the Museum’s Spitzer Hall of Human Origins are invited to “walk” in the footsteps of hominins who lived some 3.6 million years ago. For Brian Richmond deciphering what such footprints can tell us about the behavior of our early ancestors is the stuff of his life’s work.

Elsa M. Redmond, a research associate in the Museum’s Division of Anthropology, was recently elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Redmond, an anthropological archaeologist whose expertise lies in Latin America, is one of 84 scientists recognized in 2014 for “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.”

Excavations at Mexico’s Valley of Oaxaca have recovered the region’s earliest known temple precinct, which, according to a new study by the American Museum of Natural History, existed about 1,500 years earlier than similar temples described by colonial Europeans. The findings are described this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

David Hurst Thomas is the curator of North American Archaeology in the Museum’s Division of Anthropology and has spent his career studying the human history of St. Catherines Island. Below, he explains how archaeological finds are proving history books wrong.

For nearly four decades, it’s been my privilege to work as an archaeologist on St. Catherines—a Manhattan-sized island 10 miles off the Georgia coastline. One of the storied Golden Isles, St. Catherines is privately owned; only two people live there. Forty years ago, the Edward John Noble Foundation established a long-term relationship with the American Museum of Natural History to pursue scientific research, conservation, and education on the island.